$1M One-of-a-kind Apple I “Celebration” will be auctioned this week
An extremely rare pre-production Apple 1 computer has been recently announced as one of the hottest auction items this year. The Apple I “Celebration” features a blank PCB board, and no record of any such board being sold by either Steve Jobs nor Steve Wozniak, which can only mean that the board was never meant to reach the public.
The complete kit will be put up for auction this week, on July 25th, and includes the original PCB board, the ACI cassette board, with two cassette tapes containing Basic, the original power supply, a cassette interface manual, a promotional flyer, and the original Apple I operation manual.
According to auction house CharityBuzz, where the machine will be put up for sale, the “Celebration” is the first Apple I computer carrying a documented provenance, traced back to an early Apple employee who acquired it in 1977, and sold it in January 2000.
Originally, only 200 Apple I units were made, of which only 63 remain in existence as of 2013, only six of which are in working conditions. The highest price paid for an original auctioned Apple I was $905,000, in October 2014, to the Henry Ford Museum, and the original Apple 1 kit included a similar array of components and items as the Celebration. With that said, the uniqueness of the Celebration model is such that the computer is expected to reach the highest recorded bid in the history of vintage Apple computers, at around $1 Million.
The reason why so few Apple I computers have survived was due to their discontinuation in October 1977, when Apple began offering trade-ins and promotional offers to convince original owners of the Apple I to return their units and upgrade to the Apple II, introduced in April 1977. Every board recovered from original Apple I computers was reportedly destroyed.
The auction for the Apple I “Celebration” model will start on July 25th and will run through August 25th.